An analysis by The Associated Press reveals that targeting small businesses is a lucrative strategy for the Business Software Alliance, the main global copyright-enforcement watchdog for such companies as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp.

Responding to a soon-to-be released study revealing that as many as a half a million database servers aren't protected by firewalls, security experts contend the findings constitute a call to action for security pros and database administrators everywhere.

In announcing today that it will release to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 this month, Microsoft is meeting the most optimistic forecasts for when the long anticipated upgrade to its flagship IDE would ship.

The ongoing file format battle between proponents of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) took a surprising turn lthis week, when a key ODF proponent announced that it intended to abandon the ISO-approved specification.

The management of services by IT departments is the subject of an August 2007 report by the Aberdeen Group. The report focuses on companies that use IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based approaches, which is a set of best practices for IT. The report specifically hones in on an ITIL discipline called IT Service Management (ITSM).